Wednesday, November 02, 2005

If I follow you I am conforming my actions to those you want and if I implement according to some policy, I am conforming my actions to support that policy. When I want to follow while implementing something, conforming accomplishes that.

One outcome of my conforming is that I partially qualify to make a contribution to something - as you can see from earlier posts, I also need to be responding and realizing. Another outcome is that I partially qualify to be in an organization - again from other posts, I also need to be respecting and structuring.

Personally, conforming presents me with a challenge when I experience it as idealistic, for its own sake. However, when I experience the outcomes of organization and contribution that are supported by conforming, I recognize it to be a valuable practice.

1 comment:

You're quite right in saying that conforming is a form of following; however, in the case of idealogical conforming, it strikes me as a bit more than that. When I worked in IT I had to conform my teams goal around the overall business strategy, as defined by the CIO, the CEO and other business leaders. Another way of looking at it is: I had to follow their lead if I wanted to retain my job.

In idealogical conforming the leadership is not usually presenting an option; they require conformance as a prerequisite to "qualifying" as a follower. Christianity, for instance, requires a belief in a fellow named Jesus. There are various other aspects that about Jesus that need to be accepted - that is, your view of the world needs to conform to an overall pattern - before you can logically say "I am a Christian". If you reject Jesus in any substantive way, you are not a Christian, even if everything else you believe conforms to that model. (Sorry for the rather incendiary example; I'm in the middle of writing about my atheism, so it's a topic that is foremost on my mind).

Idealistic conforming, in other words, requires no contribution. It only requires acceptance, that is "realizing", "acknowledging", "understanding", and (finally) "accepting" a set of ideas. (What that set of ideas actually says, the quantity of them and so on is irrelevant at this level of abstraction).

There's something wrong with my points, but I can't put my finger on what it is!

Again, thank you for the compliment! I wish your blog (and website) had been around when I was leading a group of technicians in an IT department.